Partners in Crime

Partners in Crime
by Russell T Davies
Originally Broadcasted: April 5th, 2008

Longing for more adventures with the Doctor, Donna Noble looks for weird going-ons throughout the country and comes across Adipose Industries. Luckily for her, she finds the Doctor there, but they have no time for catching up, as they have to stop the fat stealing Adipose from destroying 1 million of London's population...

Russell T Davies was always great at starting out each season of Doctor Who with an exciting, yet not too Earth-defying story. Partners in Crime continues the tradition that Smith and Jones and New Earth followed so wonderfully. Donna is hellbent on finding the Doctor again, for her life after her adventures in The Runaway Bride was just so dull by comparison. She's so close to the Doctor without knowing it from the get-go of this episode. This actually starts off a rather funny running gag throughout the episode, where they keep just narrowly missing each other. When they finally do see each other, it's from behind a window and door on the opposite side of the room where the villain of the story is interrogating someone! Speaking of the villain, Miss Foster is an interesting one, aptly titled a galactic super nanny by Donna. Her goal is to turn as many human's fat as she can into little Adipose creatures, so their parents can have many, many children. But we find out that the parents are quite a bit more law-abiding than Miss Foster. It's illegal to seed a Level 5 planet, and so they have Miss Foster done away with. The most important thing to me from this episode when I first watched it however, was the brief appearance of Rose at the end of the story. This was the first time we had seen her since Doomsday, and this is a really brief appearance. Donna just talks to her (without knowing who she is) and Rose walks away into the darkness. Really quite creepy actually. Partners in Crime properly introduced one of my favorite characters ever in Doctor Who, Donna's grandfather Wilfred. He had appeared in the previous story Voyage of the Damned, although it was not specified who he was. In fact, it was only due to the tragic death of the actor who was supposed to play Donna's dad that Bernard Cribbins ever became a regular in the show. Wilf has such a love of life and a joy in his obsession, that it is absolutely wonderful to watch him every time. The scene at the end of the episode where he sees Donna flying off in the TARDIS brings a tear to my eye every time. Partners in Crime was a great way to start off a season, and also wonderfully reintroduced Donna Noble.

Luke's Rating: 8/10